


What's So Obvious Now

by poisontaster



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-10
Updated: 2006-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-14 08:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2184246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helo's ready to move on from Sharon, but Maggie isn't sure that she is.  Set in the gap year of "Lay Your Burdens Down" (S2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's So Obvious Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sabaceanbabe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabaceanbabe/gifts).



> Thanks to ingrid-m and romanticalgirl for their spit and polish. Anything good here is purely them (especially the Orion Mist) and all the rest is mine. Oh. Or Ron Moore's. Ahem.
> 
>  _The needle's the same that recorded and played_  
>  When you left me at the greyhound the year I moved away  
>  And if I knew then what's so obvious now  
>  You'd still be here  
>  "The Needle Has Landed" by Neko Case

_Now._

"I wish I'd never found it," she murmurs against his skin, face hidden by the dark silken spill of her hair. "I _am_ a frak up."

"Hey." He puts a hand to either side of her face and tugs gently so he can see her eyes. She lowers her lashes, stubborn even in this. His willful Maggie.

Except that's not really true. She isn't his. He doesn't have the right to call her that. Karl sidesteps that thought and strokes his thumb across the golden freckled flat of her cheekbone. "All you did was find the place, Mags. You didn't make it what it is."

Her mouth twists.

"You should go." He curls up to kiss her and it aches in his abs, sore from their exertion. He joked that they should have called her Hellcat, not Racetrack, when they were passing out callsigns. He's got a bruise from that one. Got a bunch of other aches and pains that he earned in far more fun ways.

Her eyes widen and he remembers how strangely fragile she can be at times, for all she's got a punch like a thrown brick.

"Wait—" he protests, feeling her limbs gather and coil to move. "Mags…Maggie…wait." He curls his fingers around her biceps. "It's not… I don't _.want_ you to go."

Maggie's eyes narrow, the stiff-backed affronted look he's more familiar with. "Then don't ask me to," she replies, heated and angry. "Just because I frak you…"

He rears up again, pressing his lips over hers again and again, silencing her protests until her eyes flutter shut, until her hands cup the sides of his head, until her knees spread wide over his hips. "I don't want you to go," he murmurs again, before the heated slide of their bodies robs him of the ability to say anything coherent again.

***

_Then._

"Lieutenant Edmonson."

The dry graveled tone of Admiral Adama's voice behind her makes her jump, turning quickly. "Sir," she says, sketching off a quick—but sharp, dammit—salute to cover her nervousness.

He returns the salute briefly then comes to stand next to her at the viewport, hands clasped behind his back. "It's quite a sight to behold, isn't it?"

"That it is, sir," she agrees, looking again at the hazy, glowing ball of New Caprica outside the viewport. Personally, she finds it distasteful that newly-elected President Baltar would name it that; it seems ill-omened. When she'd been little, her aunt Travis had given birth to a little girl that she named Assyra, the same name she'd given to the baby that died two years before. Mags's grandmother had told everyone that no good would come of it, but Travis had been determined and in two weeks, the baby had sickened and died.

_Just goes to show,_ Granna had said, shaking her head as she laid out her mourning robes. _Names have power. That's why you're our little Pearl, Maggie m'dear—lustrous with a heart of pure grit._

"And yet you opted against outmuster," Adama observes, returning her mind to the conversation at hand.

Maggie shrugs. It had been worth a half-day's run in the newscasts; Lieutenant Margaret Edmonson, one of the discoverers of New Caprica, declining to leave military service for the growing settlement. It was quickly eclipsed by President Baltar's election of former Lieutenant Felix Gaeta as his Chief Advisor and she was more than relieved to sink back into obscurity. "Fleet's my life now, sir," she says. She thinks she probably sounds ungracious about it, but it's no less than the truth.

Adama nods—which could mean _anything_ —and returns to his observation of the planet. Maggie fidgets, not sure if this is the end of the discussion, such as it is, or whether the Old Man has more to say; unsure whether she should stay or go.

Finally Adama lets out a barely audible sigh and she sees his shoulders slump a bit. "You know that Lieutenant Thrace is leaving active service."

It's not a question and there's really no reason it would be. Starbuck's whirlwind marriage and resignation from the Fleet is a nine-day wonder, ripping through the Fleet scuttlebutt faster than a Cylon Raider. "Of course," she answers. She's actually a little proud of herself. She's not good at this and she hasn't put her foot in her mouth at all yet.

_Yet,_ she reminds herself. "It'll be a great loss to the Fleet," she says aloud. There. That's diplomatic enough. And true; she and Kara may not get along, but she can't deny Kara's prowess behind the stick. Even when she's half-drunk. Maggie doesn't feel quite as secure as President Baltar that they're safe here as he seems to think and the loss of every pilot makes her twitchy and irritable.

"It is that," Adama agrees, swiping a finger under his rimless glasses and across his eye. Not like tears, but like it itches. Thoughtful. Not that she doesn't think the Old Man _wouldn't_ cry for Starbuck. If he had tear ducts, which she's not so sure about. "But the point is that it leaves us without a CAG."

"Yes, sir," Maggie agrees and waits for more.

The silence stretches out and Maggie blots her palms subtly against her trousers.

"I was thinking of you, Lieutenant," Adama prompts and there's something far back in his tone that makes her think he's amused.

"Oh." Maggie blinks. Then something _snaps_ in her brain and she puts it all together. _"Oh!"_ She wonders if it's possible to die from sheer stupidity. "But…sir. I'm not a Viper pilot."

"There is that," Adama says, as if she'd said something inane. "But we're losing a lot of Viper pilots and what I am more concerned with is not so much speed on the stick as it is a level head and an inclination towards leadership."

And now Maggie _knows_ she's got to be drunk or frakked up or dreaming because if there were any qualities you were going to attribute to her (tactless, temperamental, mouthy, bitchy), level-headed and a leader would not be them. "I…I don't know what to say, sir."

"Say yes," Adama offers and there's a twinkle in his eyes. Or maybe it's the light off his glasses, Maggie doesn't know.

"Um. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Uh, _sir_."

***

_Now._

He sometimes thinks it might mean something, that any time she enters a room, he's the first person her eyes go to.

It's only for a second, not even long enough for him to acknowledge it before her gaze skates away and he thinks that might just say everything there is to know about them. So careful. Still so very careful, even when he's not sure about the reasons they do it anymore.

Sharon's not between them…except in the way that Sharon's _always_ between them; their ranks aren't an issue and even if they were, the Fleet's running thin enough that the fraternization regs are as lax as Apollo's pants.

The point is that—everything else aside—what's between them is and possibly always will be Mags.

She swaggers—and don't listen to her, she really _does_ have a swagger on her—into the CIC and through to the tactical room, head up, shoulders back. Her promotion to CAG agrees with her and although doesn't have the unconscious grace that Kara had on the stick, she works damn hard and she's damn good. Just as he told her she'd be, if she ever bothered to listen to a frakking word he says.

He catches the quick cat-gleam of her eye on him though, and thinks again, _That's got to mean_ something.

He just wishes he was sure what.

***

_Then._

"So were you ever going to tell me?" Karl murmurs against her neck. His one hand works her flight suit off her shoulder while the other is curved around her rump, pulling her tight against him.

"Tell you what?" It's always so hard to think when he has her like this. It's so hard to remember to be careful. So hard to remember the reasons why she has to be. She brushes her mouth over his throat in the place where she knows it tickles but it also makes him gasp and grind against her. It's late; his stubble has grown out enough to rasp rough over her lips.

"That Adama made you CAG," he reminds her and pulls back to look her in the eye. His smile is crooked and there's something off-kilter about it that she can't quite pinpoint.

"Oh." Maggie tugs the tight cuffs of the flight suit over her fingers and lets it fall loose to her waist. There's a crescent moon of pale belly between the bottom of her tanks and the top of her panties now bared; Karl's fingers skim across it, simultaneously icy and hot and she feels her skin break out in gooseflesh. "I didn't think it really mattered."

"Mags—" he sounds sort of exasperated and she feels her own blood heat in answer. "Of course it matters; it's a huge promotion."

"Well, maybe I just didn't think you'd care," she answers stiffly. It's a little difficult to maintain the proper dignity when balanced on Karl's tree-trunk thighs and his hand is making distracting circles on her stomach, but she manages. That's what it's all about with Karl anyway, right? Managing. Managing her time. Managing her feelings. Managing his when he gets too maudlin or too close to things she doesn't want him to see or know.

"Why would you think that? Gods, Mags, sometimes I feel like you say these things just to get a rise out of me…"

"You!" she hisses in return, sliding back, struggling up off his lap. "That's just it, Karl, it's always about _you_. You're not my man that I need to tell you every frakking little thing that happens to me."

That might not have made any sense. In fact, Maggie feels fairly sure it doesn't, but small details like that aren't going to deter her.

Karl looks shocked. He also looks like sex on legs, mouth swollen from kissing and his erection a hard solid line against his thigh, practically just begging for her touch. Maggie closes her eyes and rakes her fingers through her hair. "Frak," Karl breathes softly.

Maggie notices she's trembling, the pleasant pre-sex ache in her stomach turned to a bitter throb. She says nothing, rubbing one hand up and down her leg.

"I thought…" Karl says and breaks off. "I thought we were good enough _friends_ that we would share things," he says finally in no particular tone at all. And somehow that's worse, because Karl always wears his heart on his flight suit. "That we'd want to."

It's his cabin, perks of his promotion to Officer of the Watch (and Maggie guiltily remembers when he told her about it, practically bouncing; they'd frakked on pretty much ever surface in the narrow space, giggling the whole time) but he's the one that gets to his feet and walks out.

Maggie waits until he's gone, until his footsteps fade on the decking, before she turns and punches the bulkhead, hard enough she hears her knuckles _crunch_.

***

_Now._

"…seems routine enough," Mags is saying as he comes into the room with the fuel consumption reports and the latest of President Baltar's "urgent" demands—this one for three thousand feet of copper tubing the machine shops will be hard pressed to replicate. He knows from the wireless that the ambrosia factory had an "incident" last night that resulted in nine dead in a rather fast but deadly fire. Nice to know the President has his priorities straight.

Mags's eyes dart to him as his shoulders fill the doorway and then flick away and he can't help the rush he gets from it, like a secret between them.

He's conscious of the desire to speak to her, talk to her; to partake of her life for just a second because that's all she ever gives him—scant and precious seconds. He imagines she counts them out jealously like an accountant—so many and no more than that.

_Familiar equals boring,_ he heard her say to Kat once, when she didn't know he was there. _The gods save me from what I get used to._

She sounds like Kara and as he thought when Kara used to say something like it, he thinks, _there are some things I wouldn't mind getting used to._

But the comparisons to Kara go deeper than either woman would probably be comfortable with.

The truth is, Mags _has_ gotten used to certain things, certain tracks of thought as singular and solid as a Viper in a launch tube and trying to convince her otherwise is almost as impossible as getting her to admit the thought or feeling exists in the first place.

It's been months since Sharon killed herself and yet the specter of her won't die, as solidly between them as the living woman (he still can't bring himself to think of her as merely a machine, a robot) ever had been.

Sometimes he wants to shake Mags, just rattle her stupid, shove her against a bulkhead and shout, _I'm right here! With you. Don't you think that_ means _something?_ But even if he were that guy (and his mother would slap him sideways if she thought he'd raised his hand to a woman like that) it's not a tactic that would ever work on her.

He hands off the reports to Adama, who nods curtly in acknowledgement. He's careful not to look around, knowing how she hates it—when she thinks he's staring, when she thinks he's being _obvious_ —but at the doorway, when he knows he's nearly out of her line of sight, he allows himself that one fleeting peek.

The cut of her eyes is fast, but he catches it, as well as the faint quirk of her lips in something that isn't _quite_ a smile. A secret. Their secret. Except that Mags's secrets are never really allowed to be his. Which may be just as well; Kara always said he can't hold water. But this secret, Mags's secret…

…this one he holds onto. Because it pleases her.

***

_Then._

"I heard."

She lingers awkwardly in the doorway, sick with the suspicion that she has no business being here, that he won't want her here, that she's just made the biggest mistake in even thinking she has any right to seek him out at all.

He's sitting in his chair, the one that goes to the miniscule workstation crammed in under the slanting portside bulkhead. He looks ridiculous in it, dwarfing it…or he would look ridiculous, if he didn't look so miserable, elbows braced on his knees and his face hidden by his hands. Her stomach twists a little harder.

"I'm sure everybody has by now," he sighs and straightens with a sniff that he tries to pass off as a breath. His eyes are red and raw looking, but she doesn't think he's been crying. "What are they saying?"

_About frakking time. Don't know why they kept her alive this long anyway. Just a frakking toaster anyway. Roslin should have airlocked her a long time ago, if you ask me, 'stead of letting her commit suicide by Marine._

Maggie hesitates because she doesn't want to lie to him but she can't tell the truth and it must show, because after a second, Karl waves his hand tiredly and says, "Never mind. I shouldn't have asked." He rakes a hand across the suede texture of his hair. "I really don't want to know."

"It's not everyone," she offers finally. She hates how small her voice comes out. How timid. She hates that she says "everyone" when what she really means is, _It's not me._ But she doesn't know if that distinction would mean anything to him anyway.

He sighs again and blinks and then he reaches for her. Maggie puts her hand out even before she's conscious of his movement and then he tugs her forward, already pulling at her clothes, at his.

"I'm sorry," he says, even as his hands draw her down, onto him.

For a minute she can't answer, overwhelmed by the fullness of her body with him inside it. She can only clutch at his shoulders and arch, working herself down. "Don't," she says, when she can breathe again. She glares to show she means it and rocks experimentally. He shouldn't be apologizing to her. Not after the things she's said. Not after the things he's been through. She tightens her thighs and inner muscles. Karl's hips buck and his eyes roll back briefly to the whites even as his fingertips dig holes in her hips.

"Mags," he gasps, but one of the things she likes about Karl is he knows when not to argue with her and he never looks a gift frak in the mouth.

"Shhh," she says, covering his mouth with her hand as she grinds down again. Tears glitter on his lashes, colorless as the hairs themselves, but he doesn't mention it and neither does she.

***

_Now._

Karl piggybacks onto the comm. relays to Raptor Three. He's not at good a desk jockey as Gaeta, but he does all right and when he runs into Felix, the other man is always full of advice and suggestions. It's clear Felix misses Galactica and Karl often wonders why he left if he loves it so much but for all his ready helpfulness, Felix Gaeta isn't the kind of man you get personal with.

"Raptor Three to Galactica Actual. We've hit a bit of chop in the atmo; we are altering course by one-one-five degrees north-northwest to swing around the settlement and approach from alternate flight plan zero-zero-six."

"Copy that Raptor Three. Good flying." Alana King, Dee's replacement on the board, isn't as good as her predecessor either and something about that—about them—amuses him; secondhand soldiers.

There's no reason for him to monitor Mags's comm. chatter; it's a simple and routine mission to ferry Doc Cottle down to the settlement for rounds and the monthly inoculations—not enough, never enough—and back. He thinks it shows how shorthanded they're getting that Adama assigned Mags to pilot the Raptor; two more pilots resigned their commissions last week and if the CIC wasn't just as short handed, Karl thinks he would have asked to be reassigned to the Air Group just so _someone's_ covering Mags's ass when the Cylons inevitably show up.

"Raptor Three to Galactica Actual; we are setting down on the landing platform—" Mags pauses and Karl hears the uncertain break in her tone. He glances at Alana, who doesn't seem to notice. "Looks like we've got a bit of a welcoming committee out here, Galactica."

Finally, Alana frowns and presses the comm. bead tighter into her ear. "Come back, Raptor Three. What kind of welcoming committee?"

Karl slips out of his seat and slides over to Adama, who is watching the unblinking dot of the Raptor on the tac screen. "Sir, I don't like this."

Adama taps his lips with the folded arm of his glasses. "No," he agrees. "I don't either." He turns. "Davis, call back—"

Karl's stomach is growling with uneasiness; he grabs a headset off the console, "Mags, get out of there, you hear me? I want you to lift off right n…"

"Kar— Lieutenant Agathon?" She sounds confused, even as he hears the engines shift and whine. Then thumping in the background, loud, erratic, furious. "Wh…what…?"

"Raptor Three," Alana says, alarm climbing in her voice as well. "Raptor Three, do you copy?"

Karl has just enough time to hear Mags's scream before the comm. goes dead.

***

_Then._

"May I have this dance?"

Maggie looks up at him through half-lidded eyes, alternately annoyed and amused. "Don’t be funny, Karl. Lieutenant Agathon."

"M'not being funny," he answers, plopping down in the seat opposite hers like an avalanche. She's amazed the deck doesn't shake. He looks good in dress blues and she looks away, heat climbing in her belly and throat.

"Okay, then you're drunk."

Karl squints and grins, the one that makes her clench and shift her hips in her chair. "Maybe just a little," he says, holding his thumb and his forefinger close together. "But it's a wedding. Yer supposed to get drunk."

"No," Maggie says and she knows she sounds like her crab-ass third grade school-teacher Mrs. Mims and she hates it but it seems to come out on its own. "Not when you know it's going to make you act an ass and talk about things in public that you have no business talking about."

She turns her own mostly untouched cup of ambrosia around in her hand, making rings of condensation on the table's surface. Across the room, Kat starts banging her spoon on her glass and yet another roar goes up for Lee and Dee (gods, how nauseatingly cute is that?) to suck face again.

"You think I'm acting an ass?" Karl asks. He actually sounds wounded. Looks it too, when she drags her gaze back to him.

"Oh gods, Karl, for the love of Athena, don't do this. Please. You know we have to be careful…"

"Why," he asks deliberately, tilting his head in question. "That's just it, Mags. _Why_ do we have to be careful?"

The question startles her and her feet slide off the chair she'd been using as a rest, unfamiliar skirt swirling around her legs. "You know why," she stammers.

"No, I really don't," Karl answers. He reaches for her hand and appalled, she jerks backwards. "Sharon's gone and even if she wasn't…" He swallows. "Even if she wasn't, she didn't want me and I… I want you, Mags."

"Karl…" Why does he suddenly seem _less_ drunk than he did two minutes ago? Why does she suddenly feel _more_ drunk, like someone dosed her ambrosia with Orion Mist? "Karl, please…"

"Please what?"

"Don't," she says curtly, the only word she can summon, the one she's most used to saying to him, whether she means it or not.

"Mags—"

She's sweating. She's really sweating beneath her secondhand wedding finery, her whole body prickled with heat and her skin feeling suddenly too small. Why does he _do_ this? Why does he even have this effect on her?

"Mags, please, would you just listen to me...?"

"You're insane," she says. Her eyes dart around the room, checking if anyone's noticed, if anyone has seen.

"I want…"

The band—a ragtag collection of officers and noncoms from the Pegasus—is starting to fiddle around with their instruments and Commander Adama is rising, glass in hand, probably to make yet another toast to the happy couple. No one is looking at her—at them. No one seems to notice. Yet.

"Mags, I want to marry you."

Maggie goes deaf. Or she feels like it, as if every other noise in the room has been muted, leaving only the pounding war-drums of her heart and the river race of her hyperventilating breath. She can't imagine what she must look like, wide-eyed and gaping, her face so hot it feels ready to catch on fire.

"You're insane," she says again. It comes out steadily and she marvels a little at that as she gets to her feet on legs that feel like prosthetic replacements rather than her own actual flesh. "You're insane, you're drunk and you're just missing your precious Sharon," she hisses, as her faithful and ever present anger begins to rise from the ashes flooding her with warmth of a different kind. "I never asked you for anything, Karl. Not one godsdamned thing. I don't think it's too much for you to not play with my… To not play with me like this. Now I'm going to walk out of here and I'm going—alone—to my rack and in the morning, I want us to never talk about this again, _do you understand me?_ "

She doesn't wait to see if he nods or not; she can't, feeling her balance is as precarious as her emotional state. She'll be lucky if she can make it to the head, let alone all the way back to the Raptor and back to Galactica.

Holding her body stiff and straight sheerly through force of will, Maggie takes one deep breath and walks the frak out.

***

_Now._

"Look at you," Karl says gently. Mags opens her eyes, simultaneously dazzling and half-glazed with whatever drugs Cottle's pumped into her system. She makes a noise, soft and inquiring, and lifts her right hand, swathed to mid-forearm in a cast.

"You're okay," Karl says, curling his fingers around her arm just above the plaster. Her skin feels slightly cool and he tries not to think of what that could mean. "You're back on Galactica." She grunts impatiently and gestures with the cast again. "Broken jaw. Broken hand. Broken leg." His thumb traces arcs over her skin, soft and reassuring. "Could have been worse. Could have been a lot worse."

Mags makes a scornful sound in the back of her throat and rolls her eyes. He laughs, or tries; it hitches somewhere in the middle and suddenly his eyes are burning. It could have been so much worse. Gods.

Cottle told them what happened. It was inevitable, really, as the drug shortage becomes critical. Someone has the bright idea of rushing the Raptor, taking the doc and any drugs inside, and enough friends to make it almost feasible. It was Mags who got them back off the ground; Mags who piloted them all the way back to Galactica with her broken jaw, broken hand and broken leg. His Mags.

He pushes the hair back from her face, lightly and she turns her face a little to the side, grimacing as it rocks through her jaw. Karl sighs. "All right, this has gone on long enough, don't you think?" he asks.

Her head rolls back to center and she arches her brows in the defiant inquiring way he's come to know so well. _Oh yeah?_

"Yeah," he answers, cupping his hand around the crown of her head so she can't just turn away again. "And since—for once—you can't talk back, it's time I tell you a few things about yourself."

Mags makes a sound; it sounds almost like a plea but he ignores it.

"You are the most stubborn, pigheaded, _irritating_ woman I've ever had the misfortune to hook up with," he tells her, angling his face so she can look into his eyes and know that he's telling the truth. Mags's eyes widen. She makes a 'ooh' of surprise that might actually be funny under other circumstances. The ones where she _didn't_ almost die, for example.

"And the most irritating thing about you is that you always need to be right. But you're not right. You're not right about me and you're not right about us and I know…" He holds up his hands. "I know you think I'm still hung up on Sharon, and yeah, maybe a part of me always will be, because I wanted her for a long time and she and I had a baby and that still means something, but I wasn't… I wasn't kidding when I proposed to you, Mags."

She's breathing hard and he can tell it's killing her to sit here and listen, to not be able to talk back, to summon her defenses and it hurts, it really actually hurts to see her like this—hurt and shrunken and silent—but the truth is, he'll take her any way he'll get her and if he has to shred her to make her see that…well, she could use a few less protective layers anyway.

"It wasn't a joke," he says again. "I meant it. I mean everything I say to you and I've never once lied to you. Not about how I feel, not about what I think, not about anything. And I… I don't need you to marry me, if you're really opposed to that stuff or whatever. I mean... I _want_ you to, but you don't have to. Of course you'd say you never had to, but… _frak!_ You know what I mean. I want you. I want you with me. I'm sick of being careful and I'm sick of being secretive and I… I want people to know I'm yours. Or you're mine. Or however you wanna look at it and I'm not going to back down off of this, so you might as well get used to the notion, all right? Because I sort of love you, Mags, prickles and all, in case you hadn't noticed. I love you and I still… I still have to believe that means something."

And…now he can't read her face at all. Frak. He's probably messed this all up again and then what? God. Kara's right; he's sort of a disaster area when it comes to relationships. This would be a lot easier if he could go back to being the guy who was a good lay and never fell in love with anyone.

"Well?" he asks, because now that's he's _really_ put his foot in it, he might as well see it through to the end. "You going to say something, or you going to lie there like a lump until I go away? Because I'm not going away, Mags. I'm…I'm just not. So…deal with that. I'm here to stay, got it? You got a problem with that?"

Mags shakes her head and makes a sound. It sounds like a laugh.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so way back when, in the first Sweet Charity auction, my husband bought my services and then gave me away to sabaceanbabe, who asked for Helo/Racetrack, and something completely different than how this story turned out. She wanted: _Something set about halfway through the missing year. Maybe the two of them have a two-day pass and they go down to New Caprica to stay with Kara and Sam. There could even be a pyramid game. Hee. And if the topic came up in the story, in whatever fashion, about how they came to be together..._ And…this is _sorta_ that, except not really.


End file.
